…but my exercise shirt was a hit anyway.
Category: It Happened to Me
When I first saw this hoodie, my first thought was that its design was a little too bright and bubbly.
An almost periwinkle background? Pink, yellow, and light green lettering in a font better suited to selling cotton candy? Did whoever designed it even listen to the album? Even just once?
Maybe I spent too much time picking out rock t-shirts in head shops on Toronto’s Yonge Street during my misspent youth, but it’s my opinion that prog-rock t-shirts should be black. I think that Wish You Were Here, with its themes of loss and disillusionment with the music industry, is better paired with graphics like those from the video for Welcome to the Machine.
And then it occurred to me: if you were 17 years old in 1975 (when the North American tour featured on the hoodie took place), you’d be 65 years old today. Those bright colors might work better with a retirement wardrobe of golf clothes, cruisewear, and senior chic in general.
Seen last Sunday in Orlando.
Happy anniversary, Anitra! We’re now in “The Ocho!”
I saw this car going westward on Waters, just west of 275. I saw some small bumper stickers while we were stopped at the red light and inched closer to get a better look.
Smiths sticker? Okay, maybe they have mopey tendencies.
Unabomber sticker? Okay, I’m putting an additional car length between you and me.
Severed head of Yukio Mishima sticker? Okay — I’m putting at least eight car lengths between you and me next chance I get.
I volunteered to help out at Masterminds Tampa Bay’s booth at the Synapse Summit 2023 conference yesterday, where Masterminds team moderator Vadim Davydov worked his photographic magic creating professional headshots for a long line of VIPs. It was my job to help get them registered and lined up for their sessions.
Masterminds Tampa Bay is “The Other Bay Area’s” Mastermind group, a peer mentoring group aimed at entrepreneurs and techies looking for connections, support, advice, assistance, resources, and so on. Many metro areas have Mastermind groups, whose name comes from The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill, a book that’s nearly 100 years old, where he defined the Mastermind Principle as:
“The coordination of knowledge and effort between two or more people who work towards a definite purpose in a spirit of harmony…
No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.”
If you’re interested in the rest of Napoleon Hill’s definition of the Mastermind Principle, it’s summarized pretty well in this article. If you want to hear it in Hill’s own voice, watch this video:
Vadim’s lighting setup is a key part of why his headshots look so good…
…but more important are the instructions he gives you as you pose:
- “Follow my finger!”
- “Close your mouth!”
- “More sexy! Okay, too much sexy! Less sexy!”
- “Stretch your neck! Think turtle! Turtle, turtle, turtle, turtle!”
- “Squeeze your butt cheeks! Shake your booty!”
The instructions may sound nonsensical and hilarious, and he gets you into poses that you’d never do naturally, but they work. I kept telling people to just do what he says and to trust the process. And he kept cranking out gorgeous result after gorgeous result.
At 4:27 p.m. after nearly 8 hours of shooting, the last person in line had come and gone. That’s when I asked Vadim “Can you do one more — namely, me?”
He smiled and obliged. The official photo isn’t done yet, but every photo he took was displayed on a couple of screens in the booth. I took a couple of shots of these screens, and even these previews are great:
I can’t wait for the official shot! In the meantime, these are my new profile pics.
Thanks, Vadim, and thanks, Tampa Bay Masterminds for taking me on as a booth volunteer!
And once again: if you need to look great in a headshot, you want Vadim Davydov!
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Earlier today…
